Relevant Technologies: Best Product of TechnoSecurity 2006

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Best Product of TechnoSecurity 2006
By Laura Taylor
August 6, 2006

TechnoSecurity 2006 had a vast array of cool security products at their conference the week of June 4, 2006. I spent several days walking around the exposition floor, talking to vendors, asking questions and viewing demos. It’s always fun to see the newest products, and try to find the product that seems to have that je ne sais quois. It was a busy exposition and the venue at the Marriott in Myrtle Beach was very conducive to chatting with vendors. As is usual for TechnoSecurity, a large number of the products were forensics products.

In making the Relevant Technologies selection for Best Product of TechnoSecurity 2006, we primarily look for innovation, quality, and usefulness. By innovation, I mean we want to see new products that we haven’t seen before. Alternatively, new features on existing products would also qualify a product for Best Product of TechnoSecurity 2006. By quality we mean that the product has to do what it advertises to do in a straight-forward and easy to use way. By usefulness, we want to know if there is real need for this product on the market. A high quality product that is very innovative isn’t worth much if there is no use for it.

“We primarily look for innovation, quality, and usefulness.”

The winner this year is the Hard Disk Crusher by eDR Solutions. The Hard Disk Crusher is a product type that we actually did not know existed. In fact, it’s one of those products that once you find out about it, you wonder how your organization could have survived so long without it. The Hard Disk Crusher crushes hard disks – literally. To be sure, it’s kind of a butch product.

You insert a hard disk into the case hardened steel cabinet, press a button, and a cone shaped electric drill lowers itself onto the drive, drills through the spindles, and ripples up the platters. Your data is no more. If you want to ensure that your information remains confidential after you’re done with a disk drive, it is a speedy and simple way to guarantee that no one will ever be able to access your private and sensitive information. The problem with reformatting a disk drive is that you have to have it installed and powered up in order to wipe out the data. The same is true when you use bit wiping software. Reformatting disks and erasing them by using bit wiping software just takes too darn long.

You could use a degausser to try to wipe out your sensitive information, however, unfortunately degaussers don’t always work. The shielding on new disk drives is so formidable that many degaussers aren’t capable of wiping out the data. And who wants to spin up an old drive just to see if the data has been wiped out?

The Hard Disk Crusher can crush a drive in 10 seconds. If you are a company that currently shreds papers and CDs, then you should be munching up your hard drives as well. After all, the information on the papers and CDs probably came from the hard drive. eDR Solutions has a patent pending on this new product, and apparently new customers seem to love it.

Goodwill Industries commonly accepts old computers as donations. So that they do not incur any liabilities, before re-furbishing them for continued use, they now remove the hard drives and crush them. Such an obvious solution to preserving the confidentiality of your information begs the question why this product wasn’t invented 10 years ago. Kudos to eDR Solutions for architecting a security solution that was long past due!